A Soul Miles Away Is Still A Soul
by BilingualBird
Summary: Flint posed a solitary figure against a railing a distance away from the rest of the crew, a small, red peregrine falcon perched silently on his shoulder.He never seemed to speak to his daemon, and she never seemed to speak to him. It confounded most of the men, who couldn't go an hour without some sort of conversation with their daemons. Silver could barely contain his curiosity.
The doldrums were a terror upon the crew, for multiple reasons. The lack of food and water were terrible, but the lack of work was worse. It gave the men time to think, time to contemplate, time to gossip.

And contemplate and gossip they did.

They reminisced about fun old stories, like the many occasions when Silver's coyote Toja teased the more gullible crewmembers by offering to cook their daemons for supper, or the night when Dr. Howell had been so drunk his parrot Eulalia had gone from tipsily ranting about surgery to hitting on whores for his partner before passing out on a table. And eventually, as most conversations about daemons did, the focus turned towards Flint.

Gathered in a group as the men were, daemons draped across their partners in some way or another, it was glaringly obvious that Flint and his daemon were different. Alien to those that the rest of the world thought of as alien. And, as far as Silver could tell, it was a completely correct sentiment.

Flint posed a solitary figure against a railing a distance away from the rest of the crew, a small, red peregrine falcon perched silently on his shoulder.

He never seemed to speak to his daemon, and she never seemed to speak to him. It confounded most of the men, who couldn't go an hour without some sort of conversation with their daemons. Hell, Billy's daemon, a fearsome gelada monkey named Cyrilla, could barely go thirty minutes without betraying her partner's calm and collected attitude by hooting out a bawdy tune of some kind.

It was all Silver could do to contain both his bafflement and his curiosity.

The inability to communicate with one's daemon was a handicap of the highest form. Flint was a deaf man trying to compose music, ordering things to be done without having any experience with how everything really worked. By all rights his captaincy should have sunk into the sea years ago, hampered as he was. But somehow he had come out on top, he had beaten the masses, composed a symphony.

If anything, the unnatural relationship Flint had with his daemon only fed his legend more. It was whispered in the brothels of Nassau, in the ports of the Colonies, probably even at the docks in England that Captain Flint wasn't a real man. That the peregrine falcon constantly on his shoulder was struck mute as a punishment from God, to stop Flint from spreading libel, or that Flint was such a monster that even his own soul couldn't reach him.

Sitting there with the men, surrounded by people who dispassionately believed in their own leader's faults, Silver entertained the idea of it for a few seconds. That perhaps Flint really was such a monster that his own soul had picked up and run, leaving behind a shell of a creature.

But later, in the boat, telling Flint of his betrayal, as Flint had stopped rowing and sat frozen, the falcon's head had inched slowly around to stare back at Silver and Toja. Its deep black eyes ran up and down their bodies for a few seconds, stopping to focus shrewdly on their faces, before the falcon turned ever so slowly back around and Flint began rowing once again.

Their relationship suddenly became ten times less tense and Silver couldn't, for the life of him, explain why, but he had the distinct feeling that he'd either just passed a test of some sort, or that Flint and his falcon were at this point beyond caring about what he had done. After all, what was one more betrayal to Flint's veritable list of them?

Even after he had food in his belly, and a wind in the sails, it was hard to forget his previous sentiment to Billy that Flint's own demons impress themselves upon the real world. He figured that perhaps Flint's demons had, quite literally, silenced his own daemon, just as they had conjured the storm and flung the ship into the doldrums. However, he couldn't imagine anyone having enough self-hatred to affect their own soul.

And that night, sitting outside in the darkness on Maroon Island, watching Flint dig a hole a little too much like a grave, Silver felt an earth crushing need to know _why._ Why was Flint so dedicated to this war? Why did the whole damn thing always seem to have something to do with his past? And why did he never talk to his god-damned falcon?

And when he could hold it back to no longer, the question slipping between his cracked lips before he could stop it, he was completely and utterly surprised when Flint heavily took a seat across from him rather than turn and snarl in his face.

Flint looked at him, really looked at him, like he had that night they were stuck in the cages, like he was noticing something for the first time, and explained why he was doing what he was doing. He wove a tale like none Silver had ever heard of before. Of love, of a semblance of friendship, the betrayal and cruelty of an entire empire, and ideals changing so fast, so brutally that Silver was surprised that the man could even function.

"I am deeply sorry," and he was, now that he knew Flint, now that they had something other than blackmail and threats, he really was sorry. "But, I have to wonder, as many of the crew and the general populace of Nassau often do, why is it that you don't ever speak with…" He scrunched his nose and waved feebly at Flint's falcon with one hand, the other buried deep in Toja's fur.

Flint's face tensed and the raven on his shoulder clacked its beak. "What do you mean?"

Silver gave Flint a look. "Well, you never speak with your daemon, most of the men find it likely that she can't talk at all, and many believe, that, well—"

Flint leaned forward, his mouth twisting into a parody of a smile. "That what?"

"Well, that your own soul abandoned you, or God Himself struck her mute—"

"We would have thought you smarter, John Silver, knowing the things you now know." The rough, angry edge to Flint's voice and the angry clacking of his falcon's beak cut the growing tension between them like a knife.

Their harsh breathing echoed in the following silence, a temporary truth as Flint struggled to regain his composure and Silver struggled to regain his thoughts.

"W-what do you mean by that?" Toja asked confusedly from her position by Silver's feet.

Flint leaned forwards with a sigh, resting his elbows on his knees and running his hands over his face. He stayed like that for a few moments, before lifting his sharp gaze to meet Silver's.

"When has England ever had mercy? For anyone?"

The falcon hopped down onto one of Flint's forearms, and Toja's ears pricked up in curiosity.

"Especially for me, the naval officer who ordered a lord from his own home, who had relations with his son and his son's wife." Flint scratched his daemon's head gently, his eyes closed for a moment in contemplation. "They punished me of course, Lord Hamilton engineered an 'accident' when I was fleeing the port."

Flint looked solemnly at Silver, his gaze dropping to Toja. "Do you know what it's like to be separated from your daemon by one hundred yards of water? To feel hands around your own neck when there's no one in within five feet of you? To have a heart four times smaller than your own banging on your chest as you get further and further away?"

Silver took a sharp breath, a shiver running up his spine from even thinking about such a thing. At his feet Toja whimpered in sympathy, and Silver dug his hand into her fur so tightly that his knuckles turned white.

"After a certain distance, the pain is so great that it becomes pleasure, so powerful and excruciating that you can no longer feel it." Flint gave a half-hearted shrug. "At some point our bond snapped, or at least a part of it did, and Faina went limp in her captor's arms. The man thought he had succeeded in killing me, and went to drop her corpse over the edge of the docks. I myself was tucked into the bowels of a nearby ship, nearly unconscious. When he came closer, even just a few feet to the edge of the docks, we were close enough that Faina could struggle out of his unsuspecting hands and limp through the sky to my ship. After she crashed on the deck, Miranda's terrier brought her to me as quickly as possible, but the change was quite evident."

"Change?" Silver almost didn't want to know the answer. Such an attack on a man and his daemon was barbaric, something not even the lowest of low would try.

"I'm sorry to disappoint your dark imaginations, but it was no act of God, and Faina is still my daemon, she is still intelligent, still my soul, but humanity, all forms of it I suppose, have become unrecognizable to her. When we speak she understands our meaning, but does not recognize our words, when she sees humans she sees only animals. Sometimes even I becomes unrecognizable to her." Flint ticked the corner of his mouth upwards to form a parody of a smile that looked more like a snarl. "She can't talk in the literal sense, human language is lost to her, but she speaks to me without words, and I understand perfectly well."

Silver's chest felt like it was caving in, he couldn't imagine it. Not being able to talk with your own soul, being farther than ten feet from one's daemon, it was all unimaginable. He was struck by the thought that if the men knew, if the world knew, it could very well start a rebellion of a completely different scale, or turn Captain Flint from an alien man to an impossible monster.

"We're sorry." Said Toja quietly from his feet, causing Flint's eyes to snap away from Silver to her. "That's not something that anyone should experience, and I believe that we now understand your utter distrust for England."

 _SCREECH!_

Faina, jumped down to the ground from her perch on Flint's arm, and carefully picked her way across the ground between the two surprised men. She stopped mere inches from Toja's nose, clacked her beak threateningly and then hopped forward slightly to sit on Toja's leg.

Flint's hands shot out to stop her, to scoop her up and bring her back to his side, but he faltered, and they watched in silence as Faina began preening her feathers, steadfastly ignoring the frozen coyote she was perched on.

"Well," Silver gave Flint a small smirk. "Faina seems to trust me, and you've shown yourself to trust me, even just a little. Isn't that what good partnerships, good relationships are built from? Trust?"

"We'll see," Flint smiled fleetingly at him, though his eyes were glued to the two daemons laying between them. "If all works out tomorrow, if your actions with Dobbs don't bring us to ruin, if you prove your trust, then we will see."


End file.
